A Serpent In Turquoise. Peggy Nicholson

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СКАЧАТЬ worn a T-shirt over her bikini top, but it was soaked with salt spray and it clung to her body. “See? No dynamite, no plastique, no Uzi, guys, just a woman who wants a straight answer.”

      A wavering wolf howl floated down from above. She grinned, leaned back against her harness to wave, then swerved back to her attack line. If Kincade was aboard this rig—and her sources said that he was—then she and he were going to talk.

      “So did you?” Jaye eased the pickup forward and braked again.

      “A Brit met me down at the boat landing platform, all muscles and pressed khaki and a semiautomatic in a shoulder holster—a bodyguard. He informed me, oh so regretfully, that I seemed to be trespassing.” Raine tipped back her head to stare out the open window at a smoggy sky flecked with pigeons.

      “What the heck is going on? That man was crazy for you.”

      “Wish I knew. Everything seemed fine between us when I left for Ethiopia. But then I tried to call Cade when I reached Cairo, got his voice mail. Tried again from Addis Ababa, and his phone number had been cancelled. That seemed weird, but I called the Okab Oil number here in Manhattan. Left a series of messages with his personal assistant that he assured me he’d pass on. After that, I couldn’t call Cade, or anybody, for the three months while I was down in a mile-deep gorge.”

      “Maybe you two were just not connecting. His first rig was bombed about a week after you hit the backcountry. His partner in Okab Oil was critically injured. It makes sense that he’d return to Kurat, pick up the pieces, rally the troops. How could somebody like Cade be a silent partner at a time like that?”

      “Of course he couldn’t. But however busy he was, he had time enough to reach me on my sat phone.”

      “Oh, Raine, I’m sorry.” Jaye inched the truck forward another few precious feet. “But what about Mr. British Muscles? Did he invite you up for tea?”

      “No. He said that Cade was aboard, but that he was too busy to see me.”

      “Maybe he was lying? Maybe Cade was asleep, or—”

      “Nobody could have slept through that warning. And most of his crew was hanging over the rails of the platform, whistling and cheering, by the time I sailed in at its base. Somebody was bound to tell Cade that a woman was sailing around out there.” And he’d have known it was me. “No, Jaye, I finally got the message. That was a brush-off.”

      “So did you punch Muscles in the nose, and ask him to please pass that on?”

      “Tempted, but no. He was doing his best to arrange my transportation to anywhere in the world I wished to go. I could have the use of the rig’s chopper, with a transfer to the company jet. Or he’d take me ashore himself, in a crew boat. I could have anything I wanted.” Except access to Cade.

      “So, did you take him up on his offer?”

      “Are you kidding? I stomped back to my surfboard and sailed back to the dhow.” Cade’s bodyguard had idled along behind her in a crashboat, till he’d seen her safely aboard. And if anything convinced her that he was acting under Kincade’s direct orders, it was that final courtesy. Cade telling her by proxy that he cared for her.

      But it was over. Now she blinked rapidly in the gathering dusk and swung to stare at the chains of red taillights, which miraculously had begun to move.

      Home at last—or as near as Raine had to a home these days. The top floor of an old brownstone in the West Eighties, with fresh flowers in every room, and a bar of chocolate on her pillow. The welcoming touches came thanks to Eric Bradley, the freelance writer who lived on the floor below and traded office space in the seldom-used apartment for occasional concierge duties.

      His fat orange tomcat came swarming up the fire escape as soon as he heard footsteps overhead. Strolling in from the balcony through the open French windows, Otto leaped to the desk and sat down on the heap of mail waiting there. Ignoring both women, he spit-washed his cheeks and nose, then he tongued his left shoulder.

      “I met a lion in the Blue Mountains that had better manners than you,” Raine told him, “and a better figure, too.”

      “Don’t let’s discuss figures, if we’re ordering pizza.” Jaye reached for the phone book. “I’ll do that, if you want to shower. Barbecue chicken and pineapple, with onions?”

      “Yum. And there were a few bottles of Chianti under the kitchen counter when I left. If nobody has guzzled it all…”

      The apartment served as a pied-à-terre for any member of the footloose clan who might be passing through the city. Their father and his twin brother had bought the place some forty years ago, long before the neighborhood had become fashionable, while they’d been working at the nearby Museum of Natural History.

      “Still here,” Jaye called with her head in the cabinet. “Now go get that shower.”

      When Raine returned, combing her damp hair, she wore a blue Indonesian block-print sarong. Cade had bought it for her in Borneo. She’d hesitated now before choosing it, then she’d made a face and slipped it around her bare body. Just because a man had barged into her heart, then wandered out again, she was damned if she’d mourn. Life was too short for that. Carpe diem was the family motto. Seize the day, seize the opportunity, seize the dinosaur, cherish every pleasure. Paleontological fieldwork was one of the most dangerous careers in the world, right up there with test pilots and smoke jumpers. If you lived on the edge, then you learned to savor each moment as if it were your last. You couldn’t do that looking wistfully over your shoulder at what might have been.

      “Another twenty minutes till the pizza,” Jaye reported, handing her a glass of wine. She returned to the desk where she’d been sorting the mail, to tug another piece out from under the cat. “Not much here beyond the usual junk. We missed an opening at the Smithsonian last month: fossilized ferns.” She handed that over and drew out a long, smudged letter from beneath its furry paperweight. Jaye studied the return address printed on its backside. “Who do we know in Mexico?”

      “Beats me. Maybe it’s for Trey?” The expediter for Ashaway All was an ex-SEAL, probably also an ex-mercenary. In his dubious travels to unspecified places, he’d collected a raffish circle of friends and contacts. But mail for Trey usually went to Ashaway headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado.

      Jaye reversed the envelope. “Nope. It’s for you, care of National Geographic.”

      “Oh?” Raine ripped it open, drew out a single sheet of rather grubby paper and read aloud. “‘Dear Ms. Ashaway. Don’t know if anyone’s ever asked you this before, but if you’ll glance at the enclosed photo of the temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan—could the stone faces there with the snouts that stick out—be depictions of some kind of dinosaur?’”

      She exchanged a glance with Jaye and they burst out laughing. “Another kid.”

      Since Raine’s discovery of the world’s only known specimen of a fire opal Tyrannosaurus rex, then its subsequent sale at Sotheby’s auction house for fifty-seven million dollars, she’d been getting loads of letters from strangers. Most of her correspondents were male; most of them were under the age of twelve. Each was bursting to tell her his latest theory about the coloration or speed or near-human IQ of T rex. Or he was writing to volunteer, offering to drive her Land Rover and tote her rifle on her next bone-hunting expedition.

      Or he wanted to send her what СКАЧАТЬ